Different method of creating climate-smart closures

Essentially, we included the two climate metrics in spatial prioritization to create climate-smart closures. These closures are termed ‘climate-smart’ because we incorporated the effects of climate change in the creation of these closures. Again, we want to protect areas of low RCE (low exposure to warming) and low climate velocity (high retention of biodiversity). We used three climate scenarios; hence, there are a total of three spatial plans for each method (one for each scenario).

Here, we explored three different methods of creating climate-smart closures by:

  1. using climate-smart features as conservation features
  1. intersecting climate-smart features with the fisheries conservation features and retaining only planning units that are within the 25th percentile of the climate metrics

Note: the reason why 22.5% was chosen to be presented was because if we chose the maximum that was tested (25%), we would be constricting prioritizr to choose all of the planning units in equal or less than the 25th percentile of the climate metrics.

  1. using climate-smart features as linear penalties

The weights of the RCE and climate velocity were both 30% of the cost, to give more weight on the cost than on the climate metrics when choosing planning units. This weight can be changed to increase or decrease the weight of the penalties relative to the cost, but we decided to use 30% since there weren’t any significant changes in resulting total cost and % protected area when using weights of 20, 30, 40 and 50% of the cost (see Supplement).

First, here are the resulting climate-smart closures using the three methods outlined above. All of which had targets set at 22.5%.

Their summaries are shown below:

Just some notable points:

Every method presented here has its advantages and disadvantages. The main idea of presenting the results of these three methods is to show that there are multiple ways to create climate-smart closures with prioritizr. It is up to the objectives and the targets of the stakeholders involved in a spatial planning project to determine which method would be the best. I think the same can be said about the selected features as well.

Nonetheless I present some of the advantages and disadvantages I see for each method.

  1. using climate-smart features as conservation features
  1. intersecting climate-smart features with the fisheries conservation features and retaining only planning units that are within the 25th percentile of the climate metrics
  1. using climate-smart features as linear penalties

Below are the results of the no-regret closures, which only show planning units that were selected across all the climate scenarios for each of the methods. In addition, their total costs and % protected area are shown. We also created maps showing the frequency of selection of the planning units, which can ultimately help managers and other stakeholders determine the more important planning units to protect.